How To Save Time With Macros in Photoshop

Choose Create New Action, the New Action window will pop up and we can name our new action, let’s call this one BW Thumbnail. Then press the Record button in the same window. Whatever we do next, Photoshop will remember every step.

So resize your image (Image, Image Size, change the Width to 300 pixels)

Now make the image Black and White (Image, Adjustments, Black and White)

Save the image in your ìThumbnailsî folder (File, Save as, choose JPG, choose Thumbnails folder)

Close the file.

Now press the Stop Recording button on your Actions menu. Note the importance of saving and closing your file, it will save a lot of time if you are applying this action to a large number of files.

Open another image. Select the BW Thumbnail action from the Actions menu, Photoshop will now resize your image, make it Black and White, save a copy of this image as a JPG and close the file, all in one click. If that worked, then try doing it to a large number of files at once, choose File, Automate, Batch, Select the BW Thumbnail macro (Photoshop will automatically select the most recent Action so it will probably already be pre-selected) and choose a folder that contains several images. Press OK. Photoshop will now open each file within that folder in turn, alter it’s size, convert it to Black and White, save it as a JPG in your Thumbnails folder, close the file and open the next one and repeat. All in one click.

You have now created a simple macro using Photoshop Actions, experiment with different combinations of actions, you can record any set of actions and save them for later, try some more complex sets of actions and see what you can achieve.

[Image via RussPayne]